Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, and Day N
Infrastructure Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle Management: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, and Day N
Lifecycle management refers to the different stages that an IT infrastructure project goes through, from start to finish. While the specific process can vary between companies, some common steps are generally observed. Some businesses might combine the planning and deployment phases, while others include a preliminary phase called Day -1, focusing on gathering requirements before anything else. Regardless of these variations, it’s important to ask ourselves several key questions to ensure we’re thoroughly prepared for each phase of the project.
Here are some considerations to keep in mind:
🤔 Day 0 (PLAN): Understand requirements
- What are the specific business and technical goals for adopting cloud infrastructure?
- Which cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) aligns best with our needs?
- What are the financial aspects related to this project?
- Have we set up consistent naming conventions for our cloud resources?
- Have we set up a back up or restore database strategy?
- What's our disaster recovery strategy?
🚀 Day 1 (DEPLOY): Deploying into production
- Have we deployed our infrastructure using infrastructure as code?
- Have we set up pre-deployment database backups and post-deployment restores?
- Did we deploy using a fully/partially automated CI/CD pipeline?
- Are we able to stop the deployment and start rollbacks if there's a major problem?
- What are the validation steps to ensure deployment meets initial requirements?
🛠 Day 2 (MAINTAIN): Ongoing activities to maintain the infrastructure
- How are we monitoring the application? Can we effectively respond to potential issues?
- How do we gather data to help us optimize our pipeline & processes in the next iteration?
- Are we able to perform maintenance routines like backups and restores?
- Can we restore our application to a previous state if our infrastructure fails?
- How regularly are we performing security audits and compliance checks?
⛔ Day N (DECOMMISSION): end-of-life stage, destroy or deprecate
- Why are these cloud resources being decommissioned or scaled down?
- What are the steps to securely migrating data and services away from the cloud?
- What lessons have we learned from this cloud deployment?
- Are we able to stop the deployment and start rollbacks if there's a major problem?